Hurricane Sandy Relief Report

At first Mike said he really didn’t need any help. He said
he had things under control, and they could handle the job themselves, but
thanks anyway.

So the volunteer
dispatcher sent us down the street to see another guy who had steadfastly
resisted taking any aid until the magnitude of the mess had pretty much worn
him out.

The second guy had the sheetrock and insulation stripped
from most of his basement and first floor and just needed some help shoveling
the last of the debris from the basement. He was alone in the house and tired.
You could tell that it had been a nice house. This was a man who was used to
taking care of himself or opening his wallet and paying for what he got. He was
a little embarrassed taking something for nothing and kept awkwardly
offering us water as we shoveled and bagged.

When we finished that job and went back on the street, we
learned through the grapevine that Mike – the guy who didn’t need any help -
was a Con Edison worker and today was his first day off after over two weeks of
working steadily to get everyone else’s power back on.

It had been over eighteen days since Hurricane Sandy lifted
the Atlantic Ocean and washed it across the low-lying areas of the Jersey Shore, Long Island and New York
City. We were nearing the end of our first day helping the relief effort.

With about an hour of daylight left, we figured we should
try to push ourselves on Mike. Bryant and I joined up with a crew of volunteers
from a landscaping company and just descended on his house. It was a little
house, and there were so many of us that we barely fit.

His wife was wearing a tyvek haz-mat suit, and Mike and his
brother (cousin?) were wrestling with the water heater. We just took over. The basement had once been
a fine man-cave. Now it was a jumble of sewage-soaked furniture, electronics
equipment and exercise gear. The concrete floor was wet and slightly uneven, so
a few large dark puddles remained. The smell was bad. Everyone wore boots,
masks, gloves and had been doing this all day so were getting used to it.

Fox Beach Ave., Staten Island, NY

Our crew formed an ad hoc bucket brigade and passed
everything up the stairs and out the front door. Washer, dryer, water
heater.Treadmill, heavy bag, weight
bench. You can save the dumbells.Flat
panel is done for. Lazy-boy was too big and wet-heavy to lift, so we chopped
it up with a fire axe Sofa got the fire-axe treatment, too. Clothes. Shoes.
Piles of baby clothes stored away for safekeeping.A stack of milk crates packed with Grandpa’s
old stereo records. Andy Williams, Tony Bennett, Glenn Miller. That soaked
cardboard weighed a ton.

All of the big stuff and most of the small stuff was bagged
and up and out in thirty minutes. A lifetime’s accumulation of belongings
turned into a giant pile of trash piled up alongside a white Ford Explorer that
had been pushed over the curb and up against the house. I shook Mike’s hand,
promised to come back tomorrow and walked out the door. Over my shoulder I
heard him say, “Unbelievable. Two days of work done in a half hour.”

He still had to get the soaked carpeting off the first floor
and tear off the sheetrock and insulation. With a dozen volunteers, we could
easily get that done Sunday. We found out later that Mike had three relatives
in the same neighborhood who lost their homes and all their belongings. Another
relative across the street lost his life in the flood. Mike didn't come back on
Sunday. I guess he’d had enough and just needed to get away from it for a bit.

Eric Schwartz stands on his foundation and points at the rest of his house

When we first arrived in the disaster zone Saturday morning,
our brains had a hard time comprehending what our eyes were seeing. A house torn apart and upside down in a salt marsh is so out of context that at first you can’t
understand just what you’re seeing. A garage that lost its right angles is now
a side-slipped parallelogram. A Hyundai rested on the roof of a BMW and an old
Plymouth perched atop a boulder.

One house had its entire front wall ripped off leaving the
owner’s life-space naked and exposed. They say it’s like a war zone. I don’t
know because I've only seen war zones in the movies and the actuality of this
is far more jarring than anything I've seen in pictures.

Volunteers are everywhere. Dawn Rizzo is running the relief
effort for this neighborhood out of the VFW Post on Mill Road. She has a good
crew of assistants. There’s a feeding station alongside the building where
volunteers and neighborhood residents can get hot meals all day long. Good
homemade food, too. Chick-fil-A has donated hundreds of meals and is making a
lot of friends here. Private groups also
set up grills and tables to serve food. It’s classic New York. A working class neighborhood and good food’s important.

Engineers from the New York City Department of Buildings
have gone through every house in the area and checked them for damage. They’re
all marked with a tag on the front door that says if it’s fixable or not. We
stay away from the red-tagged homes. If there are special problems like
electric or gas, the door tag tells you that too.

The guys from the Department of Buildings are overwhelmed.
One told us, “We do all this paper work
and give it to FEMA and they give the homeowner a check for 500 bucks. What the
hell’s the point of that?” They’re worried that when everyone’s gone and it’s
time to re-build, “cheap contractors are going to swarm in and rebuild the same
crap that just fell apart.”

A lot of the folks are unsure of what to do next. Advice is common, but instruction seems rare. Many homeowners seem as if they would like some authority figure to tell them what to do. People experienced with floods know that the floodwater is full of really nasty
stuff. Everything that’s in the sewers floats back up into the flood. Into the
garages, the basements, and the living spaces.

Cleaning up on Fox Lane, Staten Island, NY

Some homeowners are having a very hard time accepting the
fact that they have to rip the guts out of their homes if they are ever going
to be livable again. Some think that they can just let them dry out. The minute
the waters recede, the bacteria and mold begins to grow. It’s toxic, but if
attacked quickly the house can be saved. You would think that the Board of
Health would have a required protocol for managing or treating flooded homes. If there is one, it hasn't been
communicated widely enough.

The first home we worked on Saturday, we removed all the
contents and then waited around for an hour while a psychologist tried to
convince the distraught homeowner to allow us to remove the sheetrock and
insulation. He never did, so we moved on and the house just sat there, rotting.

Liberian Children What great workers!

We had a great crew on that house. Bryant and I from PolycreteUSA,
a young German woman who worked at the UN, and Larry and Jeff -- two
middle-aged guys from Massachusetts who initially claimed to be “just surfers”
but later admitted to being a graphic designer and a surgeon. Actually, when
Larry identified Jeff as a surgeon, Jeff gave him a dirty look and said, “You
just violated the code.”

We also had several folks from the Liberian delegation to
the United Nations and they brought along nearly a dozen of their children. The
kids were boisterous, happy and full of love. They shoveled away all the salt
grass that had washed up two feet deep
on the deck and front yard. One of the Liberian men told us, “America helped us
when we had troubles in our country, so we just want to return the favor.”

Volunteers Help Sanitation Department Workers

The Department of Sanitation is doing a heroic job. They’re
out here non-stop from dawn ‘til dark. As fast as you can pileup the stuff on
the curb, they’re loading up trucks and hauling it away. These guys are
fantastic, but they’re not happy either. They say the Corps of Engineers needs
to get down here and rebuild the berms to keep the water out or this is going
happen again, soon. But they’re afraid that there’s not enough money and
influence in the neighborhood to make it worth anyone’s while.

The Department of Sanitation is supplemented by private
companies who’ve come in with bobcats and small front end loaders. The streets
are narrow so there’s no room for big equipment. The garbage trucks seem to
have two sanitation workers and a driver, but crowds of volunteers with shovels
help get the trucks filled.

With the exception of the Sanitation workers, this entire
relief operation, wonderful that it is, is manned entirely by volunteers. The
Fire Department and NYPD are all around, but they’re doing their regular jobs.
No one that we spoke with had seen FEMA. Many didn’t even know that FEMA had set up
their operation less than a mile to the north.

Cyril Checking on the Crew

During a break on Sunday, I talked about this with Cyril. A
French graduate student working on his dissertation, Cyril has been
volunteering nearly every day since the hurricane. He was struck by the lack of
any authority or help from government workers. He said, “With all the disasters we've had lately, you’d think they would have some set procedure for handling
this. Dawn’s over there at the VFW with her staff, and they’re doing a great
job, but they’re just making this all up as they go.”

I’m wondering the same thing as Cyril. I’m all for a small
government, but where’s the knowledge base and where’s the communication? Maybe FEMA's spread too thin and the magnitude of this has taxed their resources. I noticed that they still have a presence in Joplin, MO after eighteen months.

I’m also not a big fan of government regulation, but it
seems to me that there should be a Board of Health protocol for handling
flooded homes. Not just structurally damaged ones either. If the living space of a
home has been wet by flood waters, we need to have a required protocol for disinfecting
them otherwise they may not be safe to live in – and average people may not
even be aware of it. That should not be difficult.

Lastly, we need to change our building codes. Homes built in
hurricane zones and along the coastlines should be designed and built to
withstand wind and flood. You may say that’s just Bruce being self-serving, but how often do you want to deal with disasters
like this? If Joplin Missouri was built with concrete houses, fewer would have
been leveled by that tornado. Shall we even talk about Katrina? Lastly, we have
a system of federally subsidized flood insurance in this country, how many
times do you want to spend your tax dollars re-building someone else’s house?

Violent storms and wildfires are becoming the new normal.
Call it climate change or call it a growing population that naturally puts more people
in the way of Mother Nature’s fits.
The name’s not important. What’s important is that more frequent natural
disasters are a fact and changing the building codes to require stronger
structures will reduce the misery.

We’re going back up to Staten Island after Thanksgiving. We
need to see our friends at the Jersey Shore, too. We could use some more volunteer
help up there because there’s going to be a ton of work for a long time, and
we’re still just cleaning up. We haven’t even started talking about rebuilding.
Message me to learn what you can do.

PolycreteUSA has developed a program for making cash contributions to the rebuilding effort. Email us to learn the details.